#the bf & i were also in like a dnd group together but that was unrelated to the disease thing :x

[princessnijireiki]

the other night I dreamed I lived in a dystopia where like... the government was pretty shot to shit which gave both corporate entities and state military a bit more power (yikes! but also a common element in my near-future dystopian dreams, so not particularly surprising), but otherwise day to day life was like. a little more bleak, but otherwise fairly normal.

except that there was a disease pretty much everyone carried or had been exposed to that produced zombie-like symptoms. like unless you caught it early (erratic thoughts, difficulty with speech & motor skills, difficulties standing upright, feverishness & sort of early meningitis symptoms) and then basically locked yourself in your house eating organ meats like sheep's liver, intestine, and brains for about a week to recover, you would enter a sort of animalistic state and attack anyone nearby, and especially try to eat their face & brains.

there were emergency cellars or storage rooms in every building for this, in case someone who thought they just had a hangover or a bad flu snapped— you could be sick like that for anywhere from a week to a few months. you would lose the ability to speak, to stand, to walk, or to use your hands or feet very effectively, but the disease also made your eyes work very well in the dark and your jaws strong enough to bite through living bone. so in these basements, folks would bring in food & water regularly, but it would just be a room with fast, snarling, crawling people in it eating raw meat off the floor like dogs.

once the fever state passed, people would take between a few weeks to a month to recover, but if it happened in public, like at work or school, your life was basically uprooted. it was still considered a shameful, taboo thing, even though everyone was sick. you wouldn't necessarily be arrested or killed, even if you'd attacked someone else, but you would lose your job & your home and either local government or your job's parent company would file paperwork to have you relocated to a different district while you were sick, and might even have packed up everything you own already.

technically your job couldn't be "vacant" again & your apartment or house couldn't be forcelosed on or rented to someone else until you were "better," but it was still a known norm even though it wasn't strictly legal to penalize. it wasn't something you could fight even if you wanted to; once you'd been known to have been sick, you were driven away from your town no matter what, like a wolf.

there were also pills you could take to help stave symptoms off if you felt a phase coming on or if you were prone to them, but the medicine was also hard to get, and same as going to the grocery store and buying too much offal, if you refilled it too often, word would spread very quickly and people would begin to scrutinize you anytime you stayed home sick the same way as they would if you'd snapped in public.

in this dream I had an office job & I was real nervous I was gonna get sick soon, and it put me on edge bc I also had the desk in the office with its back to the zombie basement door. they couldn't climb the stairs well or work doorknobs at all, so the door wasn't ever locked, but it made me paranoid, so I brought in weights & old car batteries to hide under my desk but use to barricade the door. there were three people down there & I was scared that if the first person to get better was strong enough to get upstairs and leave, they'd let the other two out, and I'd be the first one attacked, or somehow end up dragged down. I was terrified of ending up in the work basement myself.

so to try to relieve my stress, I went down to the basement after work one day when no one was around & stole a few sealed butcher packets of meat (I felt bad about it, but the sick people paid me no mind because a whole deer had been tossed down the stairs to them the day before), and went to an animal feed store the next town over to stock up on the veterinary equivalent of the preventative.

that same night in the dream, I had a boyfriend come over— it was uncommon to date outside of your workplace or housing complex in this world because of fear of disease + strict social structuring, so this wasn't quite taboo but was definitely the kind of thing that would get your neighbors talking & keeping an eye on who to blame if anyone was attacked, very small town-ish energy.

but I set out the meat on top of like a small side table I had on the other side of the room from the bed, just in case... and I dreamed up until waking up abruptly in the morning, first grabbing the top of my head (wanting to make sure the bf hadn't chomped on me in my sleep?!), and then turning to the bf alarmed because the preventative meds had to be taken every 12 hours, and as soon as I turned he was just like, "it's ok! it's ok! I took my pill already."

and I thought, you know, in another time & place, I could wake up next to somebody and just say "good morning" without a care in the world, but that wasn't how we got to live anymore... and then I woke up for real.